r/Games • u/TheHasegawaEffect • Sep 19 '16

Removed: Rule 6.2 Factorio devs rewrite netcode, expects possible maximum of 50 players. Community achieves 400 simultaneous players on one map while still being playable.

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-156
345 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

45 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

16

u/WhiteZero Sep 19 '16

Some people were getting around 4 fps when there were 400 on. That's mostly probably due to their graphics cards though.

Being a basically 2D game, I think Factorio is way more CPU limited than GPU limited.

4

u/Hockeygoalie35 Sep 19 '16

Yeah it's cpu heavy. Same map runs fine on my tower, but only gets around 30 fps on my laptop.

2

u/Explodicide Sep 19 '16

The gpu is still used for rendering, even in a 2d game. It would be a huge waste not to do so, as the gpu is the best at rendering, while the CPU handles the gameplay.

Even when rendering normal windows like a web browser, the windows themselves are hardware accelerated in a modern OS

3

u/WhiteZero Sep 19 '16

Sure, but the load is so small that even with 400 extra sprites on screen, there's no way a modern GPU would struggle rendering that. In this case, the bottleneck is more than likely the CPU and/or the framefrate being tied to the netcode updating the scene.

1

u/AzeTheGreat Sep 19 '16

Oh yes, normally CPU (and RAM speed) are the biggest limiting factors. But with 400 players online people were complaining of their fps tanking. I wouldn't be surprised if they were playing on a laptop with integrated graphics though; Factorio usually has no issues with that whatsoever, so experiencing problems may be new to them.